Taking Shape

by Dustin McNeill

  Still unsatisfied with the Bitterman script, Othenin-Girard brought in writing partner Michael Jacobs to pen an entirely new screenplay. This second pitch was a return to form, keeping Jamie Lloyd as the traumatized heroine, Loomis as the avenging doctor, and Michael Myers as the evil boogeyman. Akkad would give this new direction his full blessing. Virtually nothing from the Bitterman draft would carry over to this version of the story, though he still received credit for his work. The new film was marketed with a subtitle – The Revenge of Michael Myers – though this appears nowhere in the film itself. The opening title screen simply reads Halloween 5. The project’s working title was a little longer: Halloween 5... and Things That Go Bump in the Night. This referenced an omitted line of dialogue spoken to Jamie by a policeman. “Watch out for things that go bump in the night!”

  BACK WITH A VENGEANCE

  Halloween 5 picks up where its predecessor left off with a badly wounded Shape falling down a mineshaft. Near death, he crawls to a nearby river that carries him downstream to a hermit’s shack. The kindly old man gives him aid and shelter. The film then jumps ahead a year to October 30, 1989. After the near-fatal attack on her foster mother, Jamie Lloyd has been committed to the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic. Plagued by nightmares and unable to speak, Jamie fears a repeat of the previous year’s carnage. The Carruthers, meanwhile, have left on vacation for the anniversary of that awful night a year ago, but Rachel has chosen to remain behind, ever faithful to young Jamie. Dr. Loomis has also remained with Jamie, though he suspects she knows more than she is telling. He warns Sheriff Meeker that Michael may return once again. Meanwhile, a stranger dressed all in black has arrived in town, identity unknown.

  Having apparently co-existed peacefully with the hermit this past year, the Shape’s murderous rage reawakens and he kills his host. Jamie is now psychically linked with her uncle and painfully experiences his murders as they happen. The Shape returns to Haddonfield and murders Rachel in her home. Her friends, Tina and Samantha, note her sudden absence but assume she simply joined her parents. Sensing Jamie’s loneliness, Tina tries to comfort her at the clinic to no avail. Fearing her uncle’s approach, Jamie warns Tina against attending tonight’s Tower Farm party. Aside from Loomis, the only one to believe Jamie’s warnings is a young boy named Billy. She and Billy sneak out of the clinic hoping to save Tina and her friends at the Tower Farm, but arrive too late. The Shape murders Tina, Samantha, and their boyfriends. Police respond but are unable to catch Haddonfield’s most wanted.

  Realizing the Shape has indeed returned, a desperate Meeker agrees to an insane plan by Loomis. They set an elaborate trap within the Myers house using Jamie as live bait. The Shape cleverly diverts police away from his home before entering and encountering his old doctor. Loomis tries reasoning with his former patient, though he’s slashed across the chest. After nearly catching Jamie, the Shape is ensnared in a giant metal net that falls from the ceiling. Loomis tranquilizes the angry brute before beating him unconscious with a wooden plank. He then collapses onto the fallen slasher, seemingly dead from a heart attack. Michael is finally arrested and jailed. Later that night, the mysterious Man in Black enters the police station carrying a machine gun. He mows down dozens of officers before escaping with the Shape. Jamie discovers her uncle’s empty jail cell and begins to sob.

  Whatever your expectations were for Halloween 5, it was clearly Dominique Othenin-Girard’s goal to give you something entirely different. Fans and cast members alike assumed the new story would continue in the direction of Halloween 4’s shocking ending with Jamie now a killer. Othenin-Girard immediately veers from this trajectory. Not only is Jamie not evil, but her foster mother is revealed to have survived the scissor-attack. Othenin-Girard instead recontextualizes the event as an act of temporary madness, a side effect of the child’s brush with evil. Yet he isn’t content to let her off the hook so easily. He reasons that Jamie must suffer as a means of paying for her actions. Any redemption will come at a cost. Halloween 5 finds the young heroine now institutionalized with debilitating mental health issues. This radically different approach to the character dramatically increases the danger of her plight. Not only must Jamie persevere against her slasher uncle, but also against the personal demons that so deeply affect her. This is nothing short of a battle for her soul, sanity, and life. Yet not everyone on the production liked this bold recalibration.

  “I think they should have gone along with the fact that the little girl is now totally evil,” Donald Pleasence told Fangoria. “I was disappointed that we now discover she did not kill her mother at the end of the last film. […] I think the story is a bit stupid. They’re obviously going to take the Halloween series in a different direction. I don’t know if I’m thrilled with that direction, but I guess it doesn’t make any difference since I won’t be around.”

  In addition to Loomis, Halloween 5 brings back another fan-favorite with Rachel Carruthers, who remains loyal to Jamie despite what happened the previous year. Rachel’s parents have left town this Halloween to avoid the painful memories it will surely conjure. She wishes to join them, but feels badly about leaving Jamie alone on such a traumatic anniversary. Loomis encourages her to go, quite possibly so that he can interrogate Jamie alone. In a shocking turn, Halloween 5 kills off Rachel twenty minutes into its story. No one seems to find her disappearance unusual as they assume she chose to join her parents.

  The sudden demise of such a beloved character was but one of the ways Othenin-Girard planned to surprise the audience. Rachel’s death was not only a blow to fans, but also to the actress who portrayed her. Ellie Cornell was quite disappointed at her character’s fate, but more so in how she was to be killed off. As first written, the Shape was to jam scissors into her mouth and down her throat. For her return, Cornell demanded both a pay raise and a re-write that gave Rachel a less grisly farewell. In the final film, the Shape merely stabs the scissors into her chest in a less gory spectacle. Othenin-Girard has cited Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho as his inspiration for killing off Rachel so early on. Psycho similarly killed Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane halfway into its story, stunning audiences who believed her to be the main character.

  Rachel’s gal pal Tina Williams steps into her role as a surrogate sister to Jamie. To the decrying of many fans, Tina is bombastically loud, giggling her way through uncomfortable situations while being completely oblivious to... well, the plot of the film. We’re initially led to believe that Tina will become the new final girl, though she ultimately dies. The decision to focus on Tina and Samantha rather than Rachel further subverts audience expectation by killing off the Laurie Strode prototype to follow the exploits of the Annie and Lynda surrogates. To the director’s credit, this was indeed unexpected.

  Similar to Laurie in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, Rachel has attempted to move on by associating with those who can lift her spirits. For this, you have to acknowledge Tina’s value. While her demeanor is in contrast to Rachel’s, she brings a sense of warmth to her surroundings. She also shares a close relationship with Jamie in spite of not quite understanding her situation. The biggest strike against Tina comes when she leaves a crying Jamie to go party. However, she redeems herself when it matters most. After nearly being run over, Jamie attempts to crawl to safety with her uncle mere steps away. Tina rushes in to thwart the attack. The Shape then plunges his knife into her heart. Annoying “Bapada’s!” be damned, Tina deserves more credit than she gets. Her death is heavy handed, but arguably among the most dramatically involved in the series prior to that of Annie Brackett in Zombie’s Halloween II.

  Halloween 5 also tries a bold new approach with Loomis. This take on the character isn’t content to merely beg the police into action as in years past. No, this is Loomis at his most dark and desperate, spiraling into madness. He repeatedly accosts a terrified Jamie, yelling as he violently shakes her: “We both know he’s alive, but you know where he is! Why? Why are you protecting him!?” Loomis distrusts the little girl even as he b
egs for her help in finding Michael. By film’s end, there is nothing he won’t do to stop his former patient. Shocking is the visual of the franchise hero using a terrified child as live bait to lure the Shape into a trap. Make no mistake, he has become monstrous in pursuit of a monster. The well-adjusted Loomis of John Carpenter’s Halloween has long left the building. See below for interesting (albeit unused) dialogue between Loomis and a very much terrified Jamie.

  “Don’t you remember last year! You stabbed her. You put on the mask of that thing and you stabbed her! I saw you at the top of those stairs. We both know that wasn’t you. It was some part of the night, the evil of it. I am begging you to help me, Jamie. You are my only chance. Fine then, go on being frightened, living your life in terror. You’ve let him win. WITHOUT EVEN A FIGHT!”

  “There’s something special between you and Michael. It’s more than just blood, more of a sensing. I believe you can reach him in ways I never could. When he touched you, he gave you something – some key to his soul – to the love lost within it. Bring Michael to me. Help me to cure him or to kill him forever.”

  Within the context of Halloween 5, Loomis pays a steep price for venturing down such a dark path. After tranquilizing the Shape, the doctor mercilessly beats him unconscious using a two-by-four ripped from the Myers house itself. Badly injured, Loomis suffers a heart attack from the strain and collapses onto his patient, face to face one last time. This brutal confrontation was actually intended to be the character’s final appearance in the series, a spoiler the producers made no secret of while promoting the film. Pleasence confessed in interviews that he had grown fond of the role and would miss playing him. The performer also indicated he would be open to returning to the franchise should future writers devise a way to bring him back.

  “This is very possibly the last Loomis picture. He will be mortally wounded in this movie and it will be up to Moustapha Akkad whether he lives or dies. As far as I’m concerned, he’s dead at the end. If he somehow survives, that’s another story.”

  - Dominique Othenin-Girard, Fangoria

  THE RAGE OF MICHAEL MYERS

  If there was ever a cautionary tale about the perils of rushing a film through development, Halloween 5 would be it. The sequel is wrought with issues that might have been avoided had the filmmakers been given adequate time to plan the film. It’s no secret that the screenplay changed constantly throughout filming with some claiming it wasn’t even complete at the start. Nonetheless, the script paints a far more complete picture of the story than the final film does. That is to say that not everything on the page made it to the screen. Othenin-Girard initially faced resistance from producers with the pacing of his story, telling Gorezone, “People looked at the script and immediately began attacking me for making the first part of the story too slow. I told them, ‘The script is not slow. This is how you build suspense.’”

  At its worst, Halloween 5 suffers from plot holes and continuity errors - most if not all due to a rushed development. One early mistake involves Jamie being repeatedly referred to as Rachel’s stepsister. If that were true, which it isn’t, then Mr. Carruthers would be Jamie’s biological father, which he’s not. A more vexing gaff involves the Shape, who should still appear badly burned following Halloween II. These injuries were quite evident in Halloween 4 yet are nowhere to be found in this sequel despite being written into the script. At one point, Halloween 5 features Michael’s unmasked face. Not only is it not burned, but the skin appears healthy and unblemished.... unlike Dr. Loomis, who still sports hideous burn scarring from the exact same explosion. The decision to rejuvenate Michael’s skin was seemingly a purposeful one by the filmmakers. Makeup effects supervisor Greg Nicotero addressed the situation to Fangoria during filming: “We haven’t been told whether Michael’s face will be hideous or not. We’re standing by, ready to rush some kind of appliance together when they finally decide.”

  This is but the tip of the iceberg. The film opens with Michael being gunned down by a firing squad with no explanation as to how he survives. (Sure, he’s taken bullets before, but an entire firing squad!?) He then crawls to a hermit’s shack where he spends the next year. Are we to assume they became unlikely roommates à la The Odd Couple? We also never get a clear sense of Jamie’s psychic abilities. She doesn’t experience every murder, though she does sense Rachel’s and yet still acts surprised upon finding her corpse at the Myers house. (The script explains she was sedated during this episode, though it’s unclear in the film.) How exactly did Michael know when and where to pick Tina up for the Tower Farm party when impersonating her boyfriend? At one point, Jamie senses that Billy is in danger, though we’re never told if he is among the dead at the clinic. And why do Haddonfield police allow Michael to keep his mask on once arrested? He was unconscious when they took him into custody. No one thought to remove it?

  To analyze Halloween 5 as a Halloween film will turn up endless issues to nitpick over. But to approach Halloween 5 as an entry into the giallo sub-genre of Italian cinema, it actually works quite well. That may not have been Dominique Othenin-Girard’s intention as he’s not Italian, but his film contains numerous stylistic elements associated with giallo. Halloween 5 has beautiful women in peril (Rachel, Tina, Samantha), a masked killer (the Shape), a faceless fedora-wearing mystery man (the Man in Black), an authority figure gripped by paranoia (Loomis), a young girl cursed with telepathic abilities (Jamie), psychological madness (take your pick), an element of eroticism (the unfortunate young lovers), an element of camp (the cops), lavish set design (the new Myers house), and an approach that emphasizes visuals over story (gestures broadly to the entire film). Like so many gialli, Halloween 5 is a frothy mix of psychological and supernatural horror with no clear narrative structure. As a Halloween, it’s a bit awkward. As a giallo, it’s bloody good fun.

  BREAKING THE RULES

  One source of tension on Halloween 5 involved Dominique Othenin-Girard’s lack of regard for what had worked well on previous films in the franchise. While he clearly appreciated Carpenter’s original Halloween, his opinion of what made it successful sometimes differed from others on the project. Citing the first film’s bloodless nature, Moustapha Akkad continued to advocate for minimal splatter. This was at odds with Othenin-Girard’s slightly more sanguinary vision for the film. (In the end, multiple kills would wind up on the cutting room floor.) Othenin-Girard’s most well documented clash appears to have been with franchise star Donald Pleasence, who did not hesitate to vent his frustrations to journalists on the actual film set between takes.

  “This director has a lot of imagination and he’s very clever,” Pleasence told Fangoria. “But I don’t think he understands that he’s making the fifth film in a series, rather than his own idea of what the film should be. I haven’t agreed with a lot of what he has done on this film, so we talk and come to compromises. He would like me to play Loomis as a strong, stern guy. Honestly, I can’t see myself veering from the way I’ve played Loomis in the previous three films.”

  Othenin-Girard injects Halloween 5 with several new ideas, the boldest being that Michael has not entirely lost his humanity. According to him, the Shape still retains a soul. This, of course, runs counter to previous films. The concept is underexplored in the screenplay and even more so in the final cut. Per the film, Loomis tells Michael that Jamie can take away his rage, though he is simultaneously deceiving Michael by leading him away from his niece and towards the trap (“She’s not up there. She’s down here in the middle of the old house.”) Is any of what Loomis says sincere? How does he know this? And how exactly would Jamie cure the rage? Questions without answers. Per the script, Loomis explains that Michael gave Jamie a psychic key to the love lost within his soul when they touched hands in Halloween 4. Loomis reasons that she now has the power to cure the rage inside him.

  No scene demonstrates the slasher’s newfound humanity better than his brief but tender encounter with Jamie near film’s end. Trapped in the attic of the Myers house, s
he addresses the approaching Shape as both “uncle” and “boogeyman,” which stops his attack. He lowers his knife, followed by his head. “Let me see,” she says, motioning for him to remove the mask. He does. “You’re just like me.” A single tear rolls down Michael’s face. Unfortunately, he snaps back into rage mode when she goes to wipe it away.

  Halloween 5 not only humanizes the Shape, but also pushes the character further into the realm of the supernatural. Whereas previous entries have only hinted at such a quality, this film makes no mystery of it. Halloween 5 establishes a clear telepathic bond between Michael and Jamie, something the script refers to as “linking.” This connection is rage-activated and allows Jamie to see from her uncle’s perspective as he stalks and kills his victims. For a series relatively grounded in reality, the addition of murder-telepathy to the mythology is arguably a strange one. Nothing in the previous installments suggest that “linking” would be among the Shape’s abilities. Ultimately, this may have a been a supernatural bridge too far as future Halloween filmmakers would proceed as though this development never occurred.

  “I may have broken some of the rules. Knowing myself I tend to always want to break them. I apologize to those who feel offended, but I stand behind my innovative choices and Mr. Akkad did too.”